For two days in the December the solar wind suddenly stop on Mars and its atmosphere on the sun-facing side swelled "by nearly four times its usual size — from its usual 497 miles (800 km) to over 1,864 miles (3,000 km)".
Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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TechTranscript
00:00Today, Mars is a cold desert surrounded by a thin wisp of air.
00:05But its dry lake beds and empty river channels point to a warmer, wetter past maintained
00:11by a thicker atmosphere.
00:13Where did the ancient atmosphere go, and with it, the water?
00:18To answer that question, NASA's MAVEN orbiter has been studying the upper atmosphere of
00:23Mars since 2014.
00:25Now, it has witnessed a rare phenomenon that was last seen more than two decades ago at
00:30Earth.
00:32Among MAVEN's suite of science instruments is the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer, which measures
00:37electrically charged particles, or ions, surrounding Mars.
00:43In this data visualization, yellow spikes indicate the velocity of charged particles encountered
00:48by MAVEN along one of its orbital tracks.
00:55MAVEN, which constantly bombards the planets with a stream of electrons and hydrogen ions.
01:00When this solar wind reaches Mars, it interacts with heavier ions in the planet's upper atmosphere.
01:06This creates a global magnetic field, or magnetosphere, that deflects the solar wind around Mars in
01:12a bow shock.
01:14MAVEN's science orbit is designed to probe these distinct regions in situ.
01:19With each pass, it crosses through the magnetosphere, bow shock, and upstream solar wind, measuring
01:25changes in ion velocity and density along the way.
01:29On December 25, 2022, MAVEN encountered a sudden and dramatic decrease in solar wind density.
01:36As the pressure of the solar wind dropped, the Martian magnetosphere and bow shock ballooned
01:41outward, engulfing MAVEN's orbit.
01:44From the spacecraft's perspective, shielded beneath the bow shock, the solar wind had disappeared.
01:50In 1999, NASA's ACE satellite observed the same phenomenon at Earth.
01:56The solar wind density dropped by more than 98 percent, causing our planet's magnetosphere
02:01to expand to over five times its normal size.
02:05These rare events occur when a fast-moving region of the solar wind overtakes a slower-moving
02:10region, leaving a low-density void in its wake.
02:14As quickly as the solar wind had disappeared from Mars, it returned on December 27 and squeezed
02:19the magnetosphere and the bow shock back to their usual proportions.
02:24MAVEN could once again feel the solar wind blowing across its instruments, and it could continue
02:29to study how Mars had evolved from a wet, hospitable planet into the cold, dry world we see today.
02:36"'But check out that the wind.'
02:401 million is amazing.
02:43Well, it doesn't result in that magnetic heat is available today.''
02:442.5 to 5 seconds
02:482.5 to 15 seconds
02:502.5 Window
02:51Let's go to the physical enhancements
02:542.5 Marshens
02:56Gouter
02:583.5 dynamite
03:002.5
03:01M Jesper
03:0260坐
03:0230
03:04Saße